PHP developer Matthew Heard (middle) setting up to play Mortal Combat at a game room at Kixeye while tools engineer Jeremy Ehrhardt (back left) plays PacMan with PHP developer Nick Brittain (right) at a Kixeye game room while taking a break in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, September 24, 2012.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

PHP developer Matthew Heard (middle) setting up to play Mortal...

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Left to right--PHP developer Matthew Heard, tools engineer Tosh Okonogi, tools engineer Joey Kohn, and systems engineer Manny Ponce playing Mortal Combat at a game room at Kixeye while taking a break in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, September 24, 2012.

"Make it more evil" was not a request architect James Pollet had heard from a client before.

He asked what kind of evil they wanted - a palpable sense of dread or just kind of a drippy, oozing ax-murder fiendishness?

"Death Star," said Kixeye CEO Will Harbin.

In June, the hard-core and fast-growing gaming company Kixeye moved into its dream office: a 52,590-square-foot space in an elegant old white building at Bush and Kearny, which Rapt Studio converted into a video game reality. While some office workers may decorate their cubicles with skeletons and ghosts for Halloween, spookiness is part of the everyday decor at the bunker-like Kixeye offices, where the interior design is informed by film noir and science fiction, in stark contrast to standard startup fare.

The elevators open onto a lobby drenched in red light. Speakers overhead mutter boiler noises and bureaucratic murmurs - "Report to Lab B for testing," AOL dial-up sounds, "Ice cream social at 2:30 p.m." At the end of the lobby, an armed man in military fatigues sits at a desk, an iron chair at his side as if for an interrogation. Closer inspection reveals that his uniform's drab camouflage is pixelated, purposefully made to look like a video game character.

Past a narrow walkway and two beds of harsh red fluorescent lights, the lobby opens onto a stark white reception room. Two young women in low-cut tops stand at a desk offering candy. Behind them is a carved unicorn with a glowing red eye.

In the work spaces, almost every inward-facing wall is coated in paint that lets it be used like a whiteboard. Employees draw on them - dragons, headless men, humanoid worms. (Of course, each floor also has a game room filled with monitors and game consoles, Nerf machine guns and old-fashioned board games like Risk).

A Richard Misrach photo of an enormous desert fire hangs behind Harbin's seat. Tron figurines and a gold-plated Beretta 92 lamp by Philippe Starck sit on his desk. Drawn on the wall outside is a dragon eating a dog who's clutching a human skull.

Founded in 2009, Kixeye has 300 employees and $100 million in annual revenue. While its predecessor and competitor Zynga offers light, fun online gaming, Kixeye found its niche bringing hard-core, real-time gaming to Facebook. Their products - "Backyard Monsters," "Battle Pirates" and "War Commanders" - now have more than 5 million active monthly users. They are hiring 30 people a month and have already outgrown three offices.

"Most startups want lava lamps, bean bags, indoor slides," Pollet says wearily. The architect started his firm, Rapt, during the first dot-com boom. "Kixeye wanted their space to feel like their product."

Executive producer Scott Howard, 38, says, "When I bring people up that elevator, it freaks them out, and I love that. When I get to work in the morning, I know it's not like anywhere else. It's a reminder that this is our clubhouse."

"I can get carried away decorating," says Harbin. "I love it, how creepy it is, how the games become the space."

He will have plenty more to decorate. Kixeye is taking over the three stories upstairs.